You said "GnuLix" in the original subject line. Gag. Awful, awful. Lix = licks = round appendages. Linux = Line-ucks = Linus = Torvalds. Don't shorten it please.
As for Stallman- GNU has a branding problem. Sticking it in front of Linux may bring GNU up but it will bring down Linux. GNU should be called Free. Free has better connotations. Free Linux? Well that is just unnecessary. All Linux is free. Only those wishing to have a false sense of security pay support for Linux.
Proposal: GNU ships a working operating system that someone not a member of GNU wants to use, or they give this nonsense up.
"But RMS made the C toolchain work" you say. Great, and lots of electric engineers made my computer work, but their names aren't on the operating system, because that's a different level of work. Everything we've seen from GNU shows that RMS can make wonderful tools for his own use, but not a particularly coherent operating system for anyone else.
So he (and GNU) get credit for the C toolchain, and get credit for Emacs, and don't get credit for Linux. Until they build one that we would like to use. Then they can call it what they want.
You'd also need mawk instead of gawk, imake instead of make, etc. etc. - there's loads of those little programs which don't have 100% compatible replacements.
Not that I agree with RMS's naming insistence, but you cannot refer to the kernel as 'the operative system'.
The C toolchain is the tip of the iceberg, there's X, multiple desktop environments, the core utils, VMs and programming language interpreters, etc.
They all ship in your operative system, and just to put it in perspective, even open/libre office alone represents a larger bulk of code than the kernel.
I'm fine with the name 'linux'. But we should indeed acknowledge that we call it Linux mostly for historical reasons, not because it's the most fair name.
I thought this debate died around 10 years ago. If they didn't manage to change anything when name Linux mattered, they're even less likely to change it now that distributions matter more. (gnu/ubuntu?) General public didn't care... I'd rather they just let it go, whining about it every couple of years won't help them much.
That's your proposal, not GNU's proposal. Please don't attribute it to GNU like that.
Linux is Linux. GNU is GNU. Debian, Fedora etc are combinations of Linux, GNU, and much else besides. IMO it's better if the distributions don't incorporate GNU or Linux into their names.
Proposal - we leave the names as Linux. There is no reason to change it or confuse the entire world to satisfy the pet peeve of one toe-fungus eating nut.
This is a misleading story & headline. Nowhere in the article does it have this proposed "gnulix" term. I saw that this was linked to gnu.org and I thought that GNU had changed their minds, but no, GnuLix is a proposal of tinkerbrick, not GNU.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 55.8 ms ] threadAs for Stallman- GNU has a branding problem. Sticking it in front of Linux may bring GNU up but it will bring down Linux. GNU should be called Free. Free has better connotations. Free Linux? Well that is just unnecessary. All Linux is free. Only those wishing to have a false sense of security pay support for Linux.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/251510
"But RMS made the C toolchain work" you say. Great, and lots of electric engineers made my computer work, but their names aren't on the operating system, because that's a different level of work. Everything we've seen from GNU shows that RMS can make wonderful tools for his own use, but not a particularly coherent operating system for anyone else.
So he (and GNU) get credit for the C toolchain, and get credit for Emacs, and don't get credit for Linux. Until they build one that we would like to use. Then they can call it what they want.
Then we can remove emacs and have InteLinux
I'm fine with the name 'linux'. But we should indeed acknowledge that we call it Linux mostly for historical reasons, not because it's the most fair name.
(Then again, I might be more inclined to say I run "GNU" if the FSF wasn't so damn ossified.)
Linux is Linux. GNU is GNU. Debian, Fedora etc are combinations of Linux, GNU, and much else besides. IMO it's better if the distributions don't incorporate GNU or Linux into their names.
It seems it very much did come off that way. Deleted.